I happened to pick up an issue of stereophile at a record store I visited and I was pretty shocked to see a seemingly intelligent person in the correspondence section bashing double blind testing as being unreliable. I'm afraid I don't understand his angle of attack. I don't see how anything could be a more reliable test of sound quality differences than a properly conducted double blind listening test.

I'm almost afraid to read the rest of the magazine if this is the kind of letter they think is worth publishing. Is there an audio magazine that isn't filled with this kind of thinking?

Sorry, you still have provided no evidence that what you say applies to inaudible differences. So, you have no basis to say that an ABX test (which is just about audible or inaudible differences) may not be adequate because of these reasons.

Related to this, I believe that very subtle audible differences have been detected in DBTs even when the subjects at test couldn't consciously hear a clear difference.

Sorry, you still have provided no evidence that what you say applies to inaudible differences. So, you have no basis to say that an ABX test (which is just about audible or inaudible differences) may not be adequate because of these reasons.

Indeed.

QUOTE

Related to this, I believe that very subtle audible differences have been detected in DBTs even when the subjects at test couldn't consciously hear a clear difference.

Indeed they have. Subjects have more than once reported that they were "mostly guessing", could not articulate differences or sometimes even internalize the idea that they heard difference, but some of those subjects have still discriminated against a very slightly impaired signal at the 99.9% level. (18/20, for instance)

What's interesting is that in my experience, quite some of these subjects, who insisted that they were guessing, were right. Quite a few more of the subjects who insisted that they heard "obvious differences" hadn't.

Trained listeners are very often humble, having been through those experiences, and will "sally on" even when convinced they didn't hear anything, only to find out that they did.